For many unemployed workers, jobs aren't coming back

Sun, 09/05/2010 - 02:00 EDT - LA Times

The U.S. unemployment rate will remain elevated for years, experts say, a grim prospect for Americans who have exhausted their benefits.The U.S. economy will eventually rebound from the Great Recession. Millions of American workers will not.

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Here it is, folks: The final jobs report before the 2012 Presidential Election. The Labor Department announced this morning that the U.S. economy added 171,000 jobs in October, and that the unemployment rate ticked up one-tenth of one percent to 7.9%, besting the consensus prediction of 125,000 new jobs. And with the announcement, the government’s monthly Employment Situation Report can now revert back to its usual status of being just another data point among many which help paint a picture of the state of the economy.

What the sell-side expects: JP Morgan 75K Goldman Sachs 100K UBS 100K Bank of America 110K HSBC 120K Barclays 125K Citigroup 130K Deutsche Bank 130K What the market expects vis RanSquawk: Today sees the release of the US nonfarm payrolls and unemployment rate reading for the month of October, during much of which, hundreds of thousands of federal workers were furloughed due to the recent sixteen day government shutdown.

There's some evidence that gainfully employed congressfolk are recoiling from extending unemployment benefits because they've trouble believing that anyone wouldn't be able to find a job after more than a year. To some degree, this reflects a view of the recession that's national rather than regional. In fact, some states, like North Dakota, have very low unemployment, while some areas, like Detroit, have incredibly high unemployment.

"It's going to put my family and me out on the streets," is a perspective shared by many of the 1.3 million Americans about to lose their emergency unemployment claims. The program, started during the recession, was intended to help jobless people after they exhausted state benefits, typically lasting six months. House Republicans resisted continuing the benefits without budget cuts elsewhere to cover the cost.

This was a bad month for jobs in the USA. Not only did the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics report that the number of jobs remained at the same level as last month (125,000 additional jobs are needed for population growth, on average and we have huge losses from the credit crisis recession that have to be gained back) the last 2 months were revised down. The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for June was revised from
a gain of 46,000 to a gain of 20,000, and the July was revised down from gaining 117,000 job to gaining

There was one thing that was glaringly absent from the recent debate over extending unemployment benefits: a plan for how to actually help the long-term unemployed get back to work. President Obama has a chance to fix that in his State of the Union address on Tuesday night. A little background first:

Erez Davidi submits:
The U.S. consumer is the main driver of the U.S. economy, being responsible for 70 percent of the U.S. GDP. However, don’t expect that the mighty U.S. consumer will be back any time soon—at least not consuming like it used to. There are several reasons for this.